My daughter's kindergarten class has been having color days--wear red on Monday, orange on Tuesday, and so on.  She hasn't given me a lot of information about what their lessons look like on each of those color days (I know they ate Cheez-its for snack on orange day) but I'm sure it's all tied together.

It's just interesting that a simple thing like designating a special color to a particular day can get the kids thinking.  I think colors have always played a big role in my kids' lives, but now that they have color days, I hear things like "Hey, my shoes are purple!" "Hey, we should bring this snack in for yellow day!" It's so exciting to draw connections and to notice things in a new way.

So that's the simple idea for injecting artistic thinking into your child's day--designate a color day, or a shape day, even a pattern day.  Tell them it's Stripes Day and see what they find in their rooms, in your house, or on the way to school that has stripes, or whatever theme you choose.  Maybe they'll get excited about it and pass it on to their classmates and friends.  Who knows. 

For the record, this is truly a no-mess art lesson. (Unless of course, your kids go through their drawers looking for clothes of a certain color.  I can't be held responsible for that.)

I'm not a big fan of listening to Christmas music on the radio when I haven't even had enough time since Halloween to get the pumpkins out of my yard.  Or brushing past the Christmas decorations at Kohl's when it's still 70 degrees outside (even if that was an unusually warm day for this time of year.)  But it seems that it's time to get ready for the holidays, and The Craft Playground wouldn't want you to start planning without some good kid-crafts.

I hope you enjoy The New Gift Wrap ideas.  We've been looking for ways to cut down on wrapping paper (for environmental reasons) and those gift bags (because of the expense), without taking the fun or beauty out of gift giving.  I hope you like our gift bags made from recycled boxes.  And our eco-friendly snow bow will let you top your gifts with something that is not only free, but recycled.  And you can do all this with kids.

Please also enjoy the fun craft ideas including Balloon Ornaments and Snow Globes.  I'll be adding more ideas soon.  I hope this is enough to get you started.

Have a crafty holiday season!

For anyone who thinks that ats & crafts projects have to be complicated, let me tell you this is not true. Kids can be very creative if you give them the materials.

My daughter's teacher recently asked for coffee filters for a class project.  I happen to have a cabinet full of coffee filters I don't need.  (A broken coffee maker, a replacement that didn't make hot coffee, and a second replacement that came with one of those lifetime filters, and I have 2 kinds of filters in packs of 200 each.)  So, as soon as I got them out of the cabinet, my kids were interested. (The introduction of any new item in our home sparks questions.)  I gave them each one of the cone-style filters and told them they could make something with it.

They immediately went to for the crayons and pencils and decorated their filters until they were satisfied.

"Now what can we do with them?"

"I don't know," I said. "What do you think you could do with them?" I opened one up to show them it was not just a triangle.  Their eyes lit up.  They ran upstairs and came back with their favorite little puppy stuffed animals.

"Sleeping bags!"

It was a great idea, but the puppies were a little too big for the filters.  Hmmm.

"I need scissors," may daughter said. "I'm going to make a skirt!"  She trimmed the small end of the filter to make a hole, and slipped the filter over her puppy's head.  She stopped, seemingly satisfied with it being a cape instead of a skirt.  "Now I need to cut holes for the hands."

I left her to her filter-fashions.  (My son had lost interest after the sleeping bag idea, and was now playing with his puppy.)

"Can I have some tape?" was her next request.

"What are you going to do with tape?"

"I'm making a new sleeping bag."  She had decorated plain paper with flowers and hearts and was ready to tape two pieces together to make a bigger sleeping bag.  I gave her the tape.

So the puppy now sits on our coffee table wearing a beautiful filter cape, sleeping in a lovely paper sleeping bag.  My kids both had fun making up stories about puppy sleepovers, and I had about 30 minutes of mostly-free time.  Not a bad impromptu arts & crafts project.

I was at a pizza place recently where they provided each of the kids with a ball of pizza dough occupy them until the pizza arrived.  I was with a group of friends and all together we may have had enough kids to fill a preschool class, so I'm not saying that this pizza dough was the big solution to keeping them occupied or quiet.  But it did get me thinking about what might have happened, had I been thinking a little more artfully...

*Try to make something tall. Now try to make something wide. 

*Can you turn that ball into three small balls? 

*Now what can you make with that? 

*How can you make something long, like a snake.

*Now what would happen if you joined the ends together?

*Can you make something hollow, like a bowl? 

*How do you think they make that ball flat like a pizza?

The dough was a good idea.  Kids always like to have something in their hands.  But sometimes they need a little help thinking about what they can do with it.  With a few questions, you can get them thinking about shapes, properties of materials, what they can do with their own hands.  That day in the pizza place, amidst hungry preschoolers, mom friends I wanted to trade stories with, piles of napkins and pitchers of lemonade, I didn't think about trying to engage them with the dough (even if that might sound silly), but maybe next time I will.  Maybe you will too.